The movie adaptation of “Midnight’s Children,” one of the most influential of books for many English-speaking Indians, is finally being released in India, the country whose story it tells.

Ahead of Friday’s release, distributor PVR Cinemas, ran a contest giving away movie passes to Indians born on Aug. 15, Independence Day. That’s a nod to the children who, like the novel’s narrator Salim Sinai, were born at the stroke of midnight in 1947 when India became free.

This movie probably carries a greater significance to viewers in India than elsewhere.

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For one, moviegoers of a certain age will remember some of the events and characters in the movie, whose story begins during British rule and stretches to the 1970s. For another, many have very strong feelings about the book, which was in the vanguard of the boom in Indian writing in English. And swirling around all this is the fact that Mr. Rushdie’s presence in India always manages to bring forth a strong vein of cultural intolerance.

The person who might have been expected to be the movie’s harshest critic, Mr. Rushdie, has whole-heartedly backed director Deepa Mehta’s adaptation, calling it a “first cousin” of the book, an artistic work that should be judged on its own merits and not only in comparison to his novel.

“And I think it’s beginning to be a very emotional experience for audiences: a lot of people come out crying, which I think is a very good thing,” he said.

But critics in the U.K., where the film opened nationwide in December, and in North America, where it has been playing since November, haven’t been as keen. Canada’s Globe and Mail, for example, complained that Ms. Mehta captures the breadth of the book “rather than its trickster spirit.”

Here’s a round-up of what other critics had to say:

In a scathing piece published Thursday, Hasan Suroor, London correspondent for Indian daily The Hindu,wrote, “Here’s some friendly advice: keep expectations low — I mean really, really low — or else you are likely to feel crushingly disappointed.”

Like other reviewers, Mr. Suroor said it was impossible for visual imagery to capture the magical realism of the novel.

“It is cringing to see one of the most celebrated works of the 20th century reduced to that tackiest of Bollywood clichés: babies switched at birth setting off a chain of unintended consequences,” he wrote.

“The book’s irreverent wit, irony and themes related to identity are skimmed through as Rushdie, the screenwriter, truncates his well-padded child,” wrote Mr. Pinto. “The sumptuous feast that is the source material is made insipid by holding back on the beautiful and grotesque ingredients that comprise it.”

Mr. Pinto notes an especially jarring omission, that of Saleem Sinai’s listener/muse: “The role of his lover Padma, a perplexed listener, (with whom the reader could identify) is removed all together.” (Perhaps Ms. Mehta and Mr. Rushdie should have considered a mini-series.)

Roshni Devi, writing Thursday on Indian movie portal Koimoi, said “the magic is missing in this one” and described the screenplay as “befuddled.” She gave the movie 1.5 out of five stars.

“The entire parallel of the lives of the midnight children and the two countries born/torn at the same time is lost in the whirlwind of characters who already take too much time to establish themselves on screen,” she wrote.

Still, she gave the film props for its cinematography and the performances of a handful of the actors, although Satya Bhabha (whose father is Harvard postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, sometimes mistaken for the father of India’s nuclear program, Homi J. Bhabha.), who plays Saleem Sinai, isn’t among them.

Indrapramit Das, writing in the Jan. 14 edition of the Vancouver Weekly (although the film opened in Canada in November), made similar criticisms, adding that the film gets worse as it progresses.

“The first act, charting the story of Saleem’s grandparents and parents, brings no surprises, but it coasts on its quietly pretty visualization of 1917 Kashmir,” he wrote. “As the story moves to Delhi and the birth of its hapless hero on the night of India’s independence from Britain—which heralds the magic that so powerfully underscores the novel—Mehta seems to have no idea what to do with the monstrous scope of this tale.”

Still, at least one aspect of the film is unlikely to trouble Indian viewers as much as it did British ones.

Robbie Collins, film critic for The Telegraph, described the film as a “two and a half bottom-punishing hours” while The Guardian complained about the film’s “self-defeatingly faithfulness” to the novel, “which genuflects so far as to insist the audience can’t be released for some 148 minutes.” In India, that’s called value for money.

Will Indian viewers be as disappointed as these reviewers or as enthusiastic as Mr. Rushdie? If you’ve seen the movie,let us know what you thought in the Comments.

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